


Three Gifts

by IamShadow21



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alive Ianto Jones, Alternate Possibilities, Amnesia, Children of Earth Compliant, Children of Earth Fix-It, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jack Harkness is the Face of Boe, Not A Fix-It, Not Miracle Day Compliant, Not The End of Time Compliant, Post-Children of Earth, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Three Things, Three ways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-04
Updated: 2009-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack, the Doctor and the TARDIS collide in three different ways; once by chance, once by accident and once by arrangement. The consequences for Jack (and the universe) differ wildly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Gifts

**Author's Note:**

> For your consumption, three stories. Oddly enough, the idea for the last one was the first idea I had, but not the first I wrote. The second story was written purely because I thought three stories worked better than two.
> 
> Set post-COE but not really spoilery. Also contains spoilers for Season Three Who. Jossed by subsequent canon.

** Restoration **

When the Doctor found Jack, he was in a shady bar in a highly disreputable part of the galaxy. He wasn't brash and flirtatious and cocky. He was quiet; far, far too quiet. His clothing was dishevelled and dirty, and his eyes were blank and dead with suffering. The Doctor ended up leading Jack gently back to the TARDIS by the arm like a sleepwalker.

They'd only just set foot inside the door when the TARDIS wailed.

 _Pain_ , she communicated to him. _So much pain._

He was ready to shove Jack back outside, broken man or no, when the door slammed shut and locked itself.

Shared pain, he realised.

Jack stumbled towards the console, tears streaming unchecked down his cheeks. "I'm sorry," he choked out, a trembling hand stroking the coral.

The TARDIS cooed, and before the Doctor could do anything, she flung her heart wide.

"No, no, no, no, no!" he yelled, leaping up and pressing buttons and switches. Nothing worked.

Jack was transfixed in the stream of light, arms outstretched like a crucifix, head flung back in a parody of regeneration. The TARDIS was humming now, like a swarm of bees, getting louder and louder, building up seemingly to a crescendo, and then-

Silence.

The console snapped shut, and Jack collapsed bonelessly to the metal deck. The Doctor ignored him, running around to the monitor, tapping at the keyboard to see what damage had been done.

"Impossible," he muttered. "What have you done?!" he yelled at the TARDIS.

She hummed and twittered at him contentedly, seemingly unperturbed by the Enormous Fold and Rewriting of Reality that she'd just caused. That she'd just _committed._

"That was a fixed point! You had no right. It's against all our laws!

The TARDIS replied with a noise that sounded terribly like a raspberry.

The Doctor's hands flopped uselessly to his sides. It cried out to him as _wrong_ , but there was nothing he could do, now. It couldn't be undone; not without hurting the universe far more grievously.

Finally, he turned his attention to the man on the floor. Against all logic, he wasn't dead. Wasn't even unconscious, just breathing desperately hard, like he'd just run for his life. The Doctor knelt down and lifted him up a little from the uncomfortable floor, cradling his head in his lap.

Jack's eyes snapped open, and the Doctor could see a fine circle of glowing gold around his irises, not diminishing, not changing, just pulsing gently with every thrum of the TARDIS. Jack stared at the Doctor in awe and wonder, as though he could see or hear something new and incredible that he'd never been able to before.

"Take me home," he whispered, in a voice that was rusty and cracked from disuse. " _Please_ , Doctor. Take me home."

** Sanctuary **

The Doctor could have been forgiven for thinking that this was some younger version of Jack, still ploughing through the universe with no moral compass but his own whim. But the energy in him, the vortex, that thing that screamed that Jack was a Fact was unmistakable.

"Jack?" the Doctor asked, his hands up in the air. "What's going on?" 

Jack didn't even twitch at the name. Not a hint of recognition flickered across his features. "Nice try," he drawled in New Galactic. "No point trying to make friends. Empty your pockets," he said, gesturing with the battered blaster.

"That could take a while," the Doctor said slowly. "They're bigger on the inside."

Jack's broad grin was completely devoid of humour as he pointed his blaster over at the Doctor's current Companion. "Now. Or I put a hole in her."

"All right, all right, keep your shirt on," the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows. "Bit touchy, isn't he?" he added sidelong to the girl fidgeting nervously at his side.

He'd unloaded a banana, a mallet, about a dozen pens and an enormous purple handkerchief when Jack started to get fidgety himself.

"What's that, then?" he asked about the thing the Doctor had just pulled out. Clearly, this little hold-up was not going the way they tended to, for him.

"Oh, this?" the Doctor asked, dangling the Yale Key from the string it was on. "That's the key to my spaceship."

Jack's eyes glittered with sudden eagerness and desperation. "Take me to it."

The Doctor swept his belongings back into his pockets, gave his Companion's hand a gentle squeeze and murmured, "Trust me."

The TARDIS lock opened without complaint, and Jack herded them both inside and shut the door. Then immediately tried to open it again and leave.

"Let me out," he said, his eyes wild, blaster pointing from the Companion to the Doctor and back again.

"That won't work in here," the Doctor said calmly.

Jack turned and wrenched and rattled the door.

"Open it," he begged.

"What's happened to you, Jack? Why can't you remember?" the Doctor mused, walking down and standing beside him.

Jack was pale and sweating by this point. "That's _not_ my name! _Please_ , just... just..."

The blaster had slipped to the floor. Jack looked lost, terrified, and about five years old.

"Just let me have a look. A quick look. Won't hurt a bit," the Doctor promised.

Jack didn't resist when the Doctor placed his hands on his face and pushed inside. It was all a mess; a disordered jumble of isolated memories without context, and everywhere, like gaping wounds, huge voids where there was nothing at all. With a little help from the TARDIS, he dug deeper into one of the holes and caught a fleeting glimpse of something dark and horrific. Jack cried out and trembled, and the Doctor made a soothing, wordless sound in response, smoothing the memory back down below the subconscious.

He caught Jack when he broke the connection, easing the Captain down to the floor.

"Who is he?" the Companion asked.

"A friend," the Doctor said softly. "A friend who's seen and done terrible things."

"Can you fix him?"

He smiled. She was young and naive, and like so many of them, she seemed to expect him to have all the answers, all the solutions.

"There's nothing to fix," he said gently. "He's forgotten, whether by choice or out of necessity. Either way, the TARDIS is probably the best place for him, right now. It's safe, and if he's going to remember, better here than out there."

Jack's new quarters weren't a prison cell, not exactly. It was where the Master would have gone, had things worked out differently. There was a garden and a library, and a suite of rooms that certainly weren't short of comforts. The TARDIS was very vocal, here, and sometimes the Doctor wondered just how much Jack could understand her.

The Doctor visited daily and they talked, most often about dreams. Jack's dreams were chaotic and nightmarish, and sometimes describing them unlocked a memory or a fragment of himself that he'd forgotten. More often, they did not.

Still, the morning when Jack remembered Glenn Miller, a beautiful blonde girl and his first sight of the TARDIS, the Doctor couldn't help but feel triumphant.

** Cultivation **

The first the Doctor knew about Earth being in trouble was when Jack called him after the fact.

"Pick me up. _Please_ ," he asked, and knowing that something was wrong, the Doctor did, flying as accurately as he could to the co-ordinates Jack sent him.

Jack stood limply in the Doctor's arms when the Doctor hugged him hello, then stumbled through the TARDIS and shut himself in his room, mumbling that he needed to sleep. The Doctor could understand that. Time and space, after all, were the things he understood the best, and there wasn't a better place to find time and space than on-board the TARDIS. Besides, she would let him know if Jack needed help.

After two days, he was a little concerned. After a week, despite the TARDIS's reassurances, he was downright alarmed. It took a solid hour of pleading, threatening and bribing the TARDIS for her to show him the way to Jack's door, and then a little more to get her to unlock it. It opened with a reluctant creak.

The Doctor was expecting Jack to be huddled under the blankets on that ridiculously over-sized bed of his, wallowing in his own misery, just needing a bit of a kick in the pants to get up and out and exploring the universe again. What he wasn't expecting was for the bed to be gone completely. In fact, the whole room was transformed, arranged around a central structure - a long, upright, cylindrical tank with Jack's naked form suspended inside. Vortex energy twisted and wound through his folded limbs like smoke, caressed him like an affectionate cat.

"What have you done, old girl?" the Doctor murmured, sending out a telepathic nudge behind it, demanding answers.

 _Sleep_ , was the response. _Rest_.

"He asked for this?" the Doctor asked, baffled.

The answer was complex, containing thoughts and images, emotions, and above all else, the overwhelming sensations of exhaustion, guilt and grief.

The Doctor placed his hand on the glass, inches from the cheek of the sleeping man inside. "Oh, Jack," he sighed.

He couldn't bring himself to disturb him. Not when he knew how it felt.

"Will he wake?" he asked, knowing that the possibility of Jack sleeping forever in the shelter of the TARDIS was a very real one.

The TARDIS gave a positive hum. She couldn't tell him when, but at some future time, Jack would be ready to re-emerge.

In the end, The Doctor went through two regenerations and over a dozen Companions before a rather insistent TARDIS sent him down a long neglected section of corridor to an open door.

The being behind the glass wasn't exactly human any more. Hundreds of years cradled in the womb of the TARDIS had changed him and remoulded him into something different, something _new_.

The large amber eyes opened and looked deep into the Doctor's own, and he felt small in a way that he hadn't for thousands of years. This was a creature who had grown and evolved, shaped itself to accommodate the breadth and scope of time and space that it saw in its dreams.

"Hello," the Doctor said, taking a nervous step forward.

The creature's lips curved up into a smile.

 _Hello_ , Boe said, his mental touch as warm as any hug.


End file.
